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When do I see my work on OpenStreetMap?

That data from the full planet.osm is loaded occasionally into a PostGIS database (more hours) from which the Mapnik renderings happens. Then, hourly updates are added, depending on the situation even every minute. (In the past, the weekly dump of the planet.osm file happened Thursday morning our time, finishing mid to late morning.)

Tiles are only marked to be re-rendered when people actually look at them so when you first go to an area, you don't see any change. Some time later, depending on how many other tiles around the world are being view at the same time, your rendering will be done and when you go back, there are your changes.

For various technical reasons (disk space etc.), this process breaks and is re-run, so it can be well into the weekend or early next week before you see the changes from mapnik.

Lowzoom renders

March 08 saw an improved version for zoom levels 8-11 that displays town and city names in a much better fashion, as well as more detail in the roads displayed.

Stage 1 requires that a special layer be created that contains just the town and city names for zoom levels 8-11.

Stage 2 requires that all 256 z12 tiles in a z8 tile have been 'recently' rendered by the new 'Poynton' client. This client creates a special 'captionless' layer that is basically the Zoom level 12 tile with no captions.

The final stage involves running a new lowzoom process that downloads the 256 captionless z12 tiles in a z8 area from stage 2, plus the special caption tiles created in stage 1 and merges them into the new lowzoom tiles.